Welcome to Art Room 104! Well, I no longer teach in room 104...it's now room 309, but the heart is still there! I have now transitioned into teaching 7th-12th grades, and my focus is now moving towards Choice Based Learning in the art room. Join me on my journey as I enter new territory, experiment, and share how I fit it all into the realm of Common Core!

Tuesday, April 16, 2013

2nd Grade Printmaking Unit: Symmetrical City Scapes

For the second project in our printmaking unit, students created these symmetrical city scapes using the intaglio process. On the first day, we reviewed the warm and cool colors. We folded our paper in half and drew a border around the edge (sans Phyl at There's a Dragon in My Art Room!). The top half was painted with warm colors to represent the sunset and the bottom half was painted with cool colors to represent the water. The great thing I found that I like about having the kids add the border is that it makes their artwork easier to crop on Artsonia! Some students didn't do that great of a job drawing an even border all the way around, but that's okay, it still made it a little easier to get a nicer crop done.

On the second day, I introduced students to the intaglio process. I showed them how to lightly draw into a piece of Styrofoam (which were pieces of to-go boxes I bought from a local restaurant) to create the city. I made sure to show students how their buildings needed to be touching. After I gave students the go-ahead, they cut out their city and then made their print.

I had my students use black block printing ink for this. They squirted the ink onto a bench hook and then used a brayer to roll it out and onto their Styrofoam. Now, here's where I changed this project up a bit from what I found on Pinterest. The pin I found brought me to the Laugh, Paint, Create blog where this project was done as well. The teacher there had the students make two prints from their city, one for the city and one for the reflection. My OCD hit me at this point because I didn't like how the reflection isn't actually a reflection on their projects!

So, I had the students place their inked plate onto the water and press down. Before they pulled it up, I had them put glue on the back of the plate. Then, they were allowed to pull the plate up and glue it onto the warm colored side.

6 comments:

After your OCD comment, I was looking at these thinking, "These ARE a reflection! She must have pregnancy brain!" ... and then I continued reading and saw what you did! Clever! Did you use a block printing ink? How did that dry, and how long did it take? I've always had my kids toss their inked Styrofoam because of the tackiness I seem to get. These are great! Already pinned. :)

Sorry about that, I reworded my post a bit. The blog that I found the project on didn't have perfect reflections. I used Speedball block printing ink. It doesn't take very long at all to dry as long as the kids don't use a lot of ink. The Styrofoam dried nice too...nothing wiped off as I passed them back for students to take home.

Thank you! I had the same issue with the "reflection" because it was clearly not a reflection. I wondered if you folded the paper at the ground level to get a print off the print, how we'll the reflection would work?

I think it would probably work, but the problem I would worry about running into is the kids rolling ink all over the sky, not just the styrofoam. Plus, I think it would take m extra day because you'd want to make sure the styrofoam was glued in place and that it wouldn't slide around while folding the paper to take the print. What would probably work better using that technique is if you had the kids paint a city scape, one building at a time, folding the paper to take a print after they paint each building.

I've seen this project done a few times and never wanted to do it because I absolutely can't stand that the reflection wasn't a true reflection. YOU. ARE. AWESOME! :)Thank you for thinking of a way to do this and make it look awesome!I think I may plan to do this next year! :)

I'm one of the sad people who have done this project with the reflection going the wrong way! This is really such a smart idea. Thank you very much for posting this. I am so glad I found it on Pinterest because this is the printmaking assignment I am planning to do with my 4th graders this year and now we will be able to do it right!!!

About Me

I have now entered my 7th year of teaching in a very small, extremely rural district. I've been an elementary art teacher for 3 years, a K-12 teacher for 3 years, and now, I am a 7th-12th grade high school art teacher...my dream grade levels! I am also a Jamberry consultant, and while I don't find much time to make my own art anymore, I love to design my own jams!